Currently a number of activities are ongoing to define requirements on the next generation mobile network. One effort is a 5G (Fifth Generation) White Paper by the Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) Alliance. The white paper lists a diverse set of use cases, including IoT (Internet of Things), vehicle-to-vehicle communications, controlling industrial robots, high quality media delivery, etc. These use cases define the requirements for the next generation of mobile networks, where flexibility is one of the key requirements. For each use case, user plane packets should traverse a different sequence of network service functions. A 5G core network architecture should offer an infrastructure to support flexibility of organizing such service chains.
When handover occurs in such an environment, it is of great importance that this does not imply complications and sub-optimal resource usage for user services which are active during the handover.